Magazine Article
| August 9, 2017

Chasing Invention: Jeffrey Kindler At The Helm Of Centrexion

Sometimes, this industry creates problems only it can solve. The current opioid epidemic — aka, America’s new war on drugs — offers a case in point. If prescription opioids can be lumped together with street drugs such as heroin and fentanyl as a cause of addiction and death, the only logical solution is to withdraw them from the market. If attempts to create abuse-deterrent forms of the prescription narcotics have backfired, let’s abolish the concept of chronic pain and give the drugs only to dying patients in the most extreme agony. Or when patients cut off from the meds still insist on whining about their condition, let’s offer them the alternative of switching to a lifelong neuropsychiatric drug that, even if it fails to relieve their pain, at least makes them less depressed about it. Or, better yet, maybe someone should just go back to the drawing board and do what the best of the industry does — invent a better drug.